These Things Do Happen
by rosatremaine
Summary: The line between fiction and reality becomes dangerously blurred for the lead in an amateur dramatics society when he takes the role of the Phantom in their production.
1. Chapter 1

**Brixton, 1990**

" _If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that."_

The childish voice quavered and shook, echoing eerily in the damp blackness of the old cellar.

He was ten years old, and he had no idea when he was going to be let out of the cellar. It was the stuff of nightmares, _his_ nightmares, and as the darkness claimed him as its own, he tried desperately to cling to his mind by quoting the play he had been reading. Even though it was the fault of that play that he was now in this position, he didn't blame Shakespeare. He blamed no-one except his father. The man who had so often kicked and beaten his mother until she was a trembling shadow of herself, the man whose loud, angry voice permeated even the deepest sleep of an exhausted child, the man who...

The boy shuddered. Everyone had insisted his mother's death had been a tragic accident. He knew better, but he also knew better than to say anything about it.

Today he had been reading _The Merchant of Venice_ from his mother's _Collected Works of Shakespeare_. It was the only thing of hers that he had been able to salvage. Everything else was either broken or sold, or burnt.

The pile in the garden had grown until it was taller than he was. Admittedly he was an undersized, scrawny twig of a boy, but it was still a large bonfire. He had watched in horror as his mother's possessions were set alight. It was as if his father wanted to destroy her memory as easily as he had erased her existence. He had run outside, screaming, but had been met with an eyewatering blow to the side of his head, and a largely unintelligible roar. He gathered from this that his father had been drinking again.

The roaring and the beatings always increased in direct proportion to the amount of Scotch consumed.

He had waited, curled up on the ground, until the bonfire had died down and his father had gone inside the house, and then he slowly unfolded his thin legs and rose rather unsteadily. He scrabbled madly in the still-hot ashes, desperate to find something, anything left of her. He burnt his hands, but it was worth it - he emerged scared but triumphant, clutching a tattered book. It was scorched and charred around the edges, and the dark red leather of the binding was blackened and smeared with charcoal, but the main body of it was intact. He hid it under his jumper and fled back to the house. The _Collected Works of Shakespeare_ was his treasure from that moment on, and he pored over it, filling his head with words. Large parts of it were a total mystery to him, but even the words and concepts he didn't understand sounded beautiful in his head. And the best thing was that every single one of those words had belonged to his mother. Sometimes when he recited them he could almost hear her, and when he held the book close to his heart he felt sure that if he concentrated just a little harder, he would be able to see her more clearly - maybe even touch her. But he could never quite concentrate hard enough, and she existed only in the space behind his eyelids when he closed them tight against reality.

He had managed for some weeks to maintain secrecy about his Shakespeare, but all good things come to an end, and nowhere is that saying more true than in the home of a violent man addicted to whiskey.

The beatings almost didn't touch him now. He had endured so many broken ribs, sprained joints and strained muscles that one more hurt barely made any difference. What bit him worse than the belt-buckle and ate into his prematurely aged soul was the flood of bitter words that accompanied the physical brutality.

Vicious, spite-ridden invective reverberated around his tired brain in a heartbreaking whirlpool. When the attack was over and he had been shoved, pale and unresisting, down the steps of the cellar, dully aware of the door slamming shut behind him, he lay on the cold ground and stared silently at the engulfing dark. The fear ebbed, replaced by worse horrors - pain of heart and body, accompanied by a sickening drop in his already smashed self-worth. The words still returned in the blackness, mocking him.

 _What do you want with Shakespeare, idiot? You've got no business reading, you pathetic little runt. You're as useless as your mother was. Always had her nose in a book. Never enough time for me. I swear it gave her ideas. She was always less obedient when she'd been reading her precious books._

And then that moment of complete terror as he had watched it click in his father's mind.

 _Where did you get that? It was hers, wasn't it? You stole it, you little rat! Do you know what that makes you? A thief. When you're in prison do you think they'll care that you like poetry? Sniveling brat. I'll teach you to take what's not yours._

He never cried in front of his father, no matter how the belt stung, or how his wrenched wrist might ache along with the kicked ribs. He had learnt a long time ago that crying, even pleading, didn't help at all. In fact it seemed to exacerbate the alcohol-fuelled rage. He bit his tongue and clamped his teeth together, and refused to make any sound. But when the cellar door was locked and he was left alone with the damp walls, then his eyes would start to overflow with silent tears, and his broken body would shake until he finally gave into the darkness and fell into a deep and grateful sleep.

It might have lasted hours or even days for all he knew. There was no real sensation of time passing in the cellar. Sometimes he thought that he had been forgotten, and his active imagination drew him horrifying pictures of people breaking the door down twenty years from now and discovering his skeleton huddled in a corner. He wasn't sure if he really dared to shout, even if his father had forgotten him. It would probably only earn him more blows and insults. But he sensed the rapid weakening of his body, and knew that he needed food and water soon.

He levered himself up with his arms and rather shakily approached the door. It looked very solid. He slammed his fists against it and shivered in pain as the impact echoed up his arms. It was possibly even more solid than it looked. He kicked at it, trying to ignore the muscles screaming in protest at this further abuse, and shouted at the top of his voice until his breath gave out in a massive dry sob and he collapsed in a tangle of aching joints to rest his spinning head against the foot of the door.

It felt like centuries. He drifted in and out of consciousness, his nightmares seeming to take hold and drag him, screaming, back into the wretched moist chill of reality.

He missed his mother. Her absence hurt most at times like these, when he wanted her arms to comfort and protect him, her voice to soothe him and make him smile, her eyes to reassure him that someone at least considered him worth loving. When she died, the tiny pocket of safety that had existed, fragile and nebulous, in the corner of his world, burst like a soap bubble, and left only acrid terror behind it. He wanted to tell her he loved her. He wished, with a passion far too powerful for a ten-year-old, that he had been big enough and strong enough to save her. Hot tears of anger and sorrow burnt his weary eyes and scorched streaky paths down his face. He wanted to give up. But in the bitterest moments, his mother's face swam before him, and her voice, pulled from memory, told him how proud she was of him. He had to make her proud. He wanted to justify her faith in him.

He was going to survive. He was going to make an escape plan. And when he got free, he was going to prove himself to everyone - but it would always be for her, because she was the only one who believed in him, and he loved her.


	2. Chapter 2

**Excerpts from the private records of Dr Danielle Kerr.**

 **1)**

It was near the end of our third visit to Broadmoor. I was sitting next to Dr Brandt as he interviewed some of the staff but I lost concentration and found myself looking out of the window. I saw a tall man walking past, with a pale, perfect face and a slow walk, each step filled and weighted with deliberation. He was being taken across the complex by two security guards and a nurse, but he was not struggling and did not appear to be sedated. He seemed quite calm, and as he walked past, he turned ever so slightly to the side, almost as if he was looking straight at me. Even though I got only a brief glance, I was struck by his expression. His lean, lithe muscled body was battered and bandaged, his marble-carved face disfigured by a long row of stitches across his left eyebrow, and he looked defeated. Broken. But his eyes looked right through me and I felt a strange chill run up and down my spine. He looked oddly familiar somehow. I was hooked.

I asked about him and was told he was Eric Gray, a murderer who had been in hospital for seven months, being treated for multiple fractures and lacerations along with some nasty internal injuries. Apparently he had thrown himself off a third-storey balcony.

One of the staff members mentioned, almost as a throwaway comment, that Eric had been involved in theatre before his breakdown - and suddenly it came to me why he looked so familiar. Seven years ago I'd celebrated my PhD graduation by going to the theatre to see Les Miserables. It had been one of those once-in-a-lifetime experiences in which the entire paradigm of your inner world gets shaken up and changed around into something new and transcendent. And in the midst of that memory I saw the face that now looked directly at me across the courtyard. That man had played Marius, I was sure of it. I wondered what on earth could have driven a man like this to murder and then attempted suicide.

I was told that even without weapons of any kind he is potentially dangerous to himself and others, and seeing the obvious wiry strength of the man I could understand that - but he wasn't violent at all, and in fact gave no response of any kind. He was perfectly quiet and serene, and the only thing about him that showed any emotion were his eyes, large, bright and full of sadness. He looked like a king who has just lost a defining battle.

Obviously I am well aware that mental instability comes in many forms, but I had never seen any of the inmates quite so still and silent unless they were unconscious. I'd seen everything during our visits over the past few months, ranging from the loud, vicious, hard to control patients shouting and crying and lashing out, swearing at the security guards, writing on the walls and trying to stab the nurses, to the eerie mutterings and tappings and zombie-shuffling of the highly medicated whose lives were no longer really deserving of that name.

Eric Gray was not medicated out of his head, but he also never lost his self-possession for a second.

He fascinated me.

I wanted to know what lay behind this mask of silence - in fact I was determined to find out.

It was harder work than I had expected. For the first few weeks it was always the same - he would be sitting in his chair, with his hands resting on his knees, staring at the wall, and when Dr Brandt and I arrived he would look up, but he would never speak. I could see from his expression that he was completely alert and aware of his surroundings, but for some reason he refused to speak or interact at all except for the briefest of cool glances. It was as if nothing outside his mind held the slightest interest for him, and he honestly couldn't be bothered to distinguish the rest of the world with a response.

So for a month, I watched Dr Brandt trying to draw out the interior man, and failing, while I used the time to study the exterior man. His face is mobile, intelligent, his forehead smooth and pale beneath slightly overlong waves of unruly ink-black hair, his eyes large and clear and deep-set, a strangely inconstant colour somewhere between frost blue and bright green. His features are strong yet soft, or at least as soft as icy aristocratic nobility can ever be. I know I must sound ridiculous, but he has a strange effect on me. He holds himself with lazy elegance, and at first glance seems relaxed even in defeat, but there is always an underlying tension pulling his clean-cut muscles into formation. It would be easy for anyone to see that he is a truly great actor - even without speaking, he has an enormously strong presence.

I was almost desperate to know what made a clearly great mind give way, and what broke this astonishing man. But there is only so much you can learn from report papers and a face. If he continued to refuse any kind of interaction, there was no hope of gaining any further knowledge.

And then I had a breakthrough. He spoke. Dr Brandt had been called away, and as for a month Eric and I had done nothing but stare at each other across the table, it was deemed safe for me to deal with him on my own.

I sat down at the table. He looked at me with blandness in his sea-coloured eyes. Despite myself I was nervous.

In the end it was my nerves that caused the breakthrough. My hand shook - I dropped my pen, and before I could do more than look at it, Eric shot out a long arm and grabbed it, almost reflexively. He looked up at me with the ghost of a thin smile playing on his fine-moulded lips, and held out his hand to give me the pen. I took it, hesitating slightly as my fingers touched his.

"I don't bite," he said, in a soft yet resonating, slightly husky baritone with a weird hint of amusement quivering in its wake.

I gasped, and dropped the pen again. He raised a brushstroke eyebrow and leant back in his chair. "I won't pick it up again. To paraphrase Lady Bracknell, to drop your pen once can be considered an unfortunate accident - to drop it twice looks like carelessness."

"Oscar Wilde," I croaked, inconsequentially. I was in a room in Broadmoor, with a potentially dangerous patient, and he was quoting The Importance of Being Earnest. Sort of. It was surreal.

"Yes," he said. Oh wonderful. Now he was replying to my stupidity. I picked up my pen, hoping to buy myself enough time to think of something intelligent to say. His presence has such a peculiar influence on me. I'm not star-struck. Honestly, I'm not. Well, perhaps a tiny bit.

"I wondered when you were going to speak," was the stellar result of my brain-wracking.

He smiled then, and it wasn't an entirely pleasant smile; there was a lurking danger in it somewhere. His voice came out a notch lower, a lazy, eloquent purr. "I never do anything until I am ready."

Dear Lord, that voice. You could suffocate in it, just as easily as you could cut yourself on his knife-edge cheekbones or drown in his eyes. My brain stalled. What was it with this man? I had been in the company of violent, abusive patients who looked ready to commit murder at the drop of a hat and were very vocal about it, and it hadn't bothered me at all. But put me in a room with Eric Gray, who is among the quietest, most serene and erudite men I have ever met, in or out of Broadmoor, and I lose half my brain cells.

He was regarding me with definite amusement now, and, I strongly suspected, a certain Schadenfreude.

"I am but mad north-north-west, you know, and I think the wind is southerly today."

Shakespeare now? Did this man converse entirely in quotes?

"Hello, Hamlet," I said before I could stop myself.

He smirked. That is the only way to describe it. A sideways, superior, icebound thing that was too sly to be a smile and too charming to be a sneer. "You see, we are already on the best of terms, and have quickly progressed to the point of playing games. This relationship will clearly go far."

He was bizarre. I knew he wasn't sane. I knew he had had a severe mental breakdown climaxing in a violent psychotic break and attempted suicide. But here, now, leaning back in his chair, his painfully bright and liquid eyes half hidden by large, pearly eyelids and improbably long black lashes, the amusement still creasing across the pale smoothness of his long, clever face... it was hard to remember that he was unstable. It seemed insulting and weirdly sacrilegious even to suggest that something this beautiful and intelligent could be mentally ill to the point of danger.

"Am I to infer from your attention that I make a good subject for study?" His precise voice broke in on my slightly inappropriate thoughts. I really needed to stop that. I shook myself mentally, and said with as much calm as I could muster, "Yes, actually, you do."

His mouth twitched. "Alright. Tell me the results of your examination so far. Will I live, do you think?"

His amused sarcasm, hovering on the edge of boredom, was more unnerving than any crazed shouting could have been.

"I think you'll survive," I said, attempting to match his tone.

"I'm immeasurably relieved to hear it. Contrary to popular belief, one failed suicide attempt does not mean I still wish to die."

That got my attention. "Interesting. So it was an isolated episode?"

He rolled his eyes, and his lips thinned into a line of displeasure.

"And here comes the psychospeak. I liked you better when you weren't playing doctor."

"I'm _here_ to 'play doctor', as you put it," I pointed out. "I can go away, if you'd prefer, and call one of the staff to watch you."

I made to get up, but he leant forward and put out a long, slender hand, saying in a softer tone, "Stay. Please. I didn't mean to offend you."

"You didn't," I lied, sitting down again.

He sat back in his chair, watching me thoughtfully. "Why are you here?"

"I'm playing doctor - I thought we already established that."

He acknowledged my touch of irony with a tiny smirk that said quite plainly, _Touché. "_ No, I mean why are you here at all? Most attractive young women are more interested in becoming nail technicians than criminal psychologists, and I'm fairly certain many of them would rather die than sit in that chair, talking to someone like me."

I tried to ignore the part where he'd implied I am attractive, and focussed instead on the questions. "Psychology has always been the thing I'm most interested in. I love finding out what makes people tick. Their motivations, their needs, their insecurities... it's fascinating. And criminal psychology is the most interesting part of it. Why people do terrible things to each other. What's going on in their heads when they commit crimes."

"You mean, what drives a man to risk everything he has to go and kill someone and then throw himself off a balcony?" His voice sliced into me like cheesewire. The liquid gleam in his eyes had hardened to diamond-edged ice, and I could see his hands clenched on the arms of his chair, knuckles turning white with tension.

"I..." the words just wouldn't come.

The sharpness in his gaze switched off with a flick of his heavy eyelids, and he breathed a short laugh. "I'm sorry. It's something of a sore point with me. I'm not crazy, you know. I had a breakdown, and it was damn awful, but it's over. Finished. I'm just as sane as you are."

Dr Brandt chose this moment to reappear. The change in Eric was immediate and startling. He simply shut down as if someone had pulled the invisible plug. He looked at Dr Brandt, but he didn't speak, and retreated into himself. It was as if the last few minutes had never happened.

His quiet assurance had shaken me more than I liked to admit even to myself.

Wasn't it common for mentally unstable people to insist they were sane? But I couldn't get his eyes out of my head. They were clear, intelligent, and almost entirely without emotion. He wasn't pleading with me to believe in him. There was no desperation, nor even any real sadness. He was just stating a fact he thought I ought to know.

I talked to Dr Brandt about my strange encounter with Eric.

"Danielle, this is very interesting," he said. "Clearly he views you as less of a threat than me. You should cultivate that. But be careful. Never forget what he has done."

I wasn't in danger of forgetting, but I felt quite strongly that a man should not be judged on the basis of his past if he has changed in the meantime. Especially is that true of someone who suffered a mental imbalance. They can hardly be held responsible for their actions while undergoing a severe breakdown, and surely, once cured, they must be considered innocent.

I began to research the possible reasons for Eric's psychotic break. Had he been working too hard? I did a little digging.

It seemed that there had been some trouble about eighteen months before his breakdown. He had been working at the time with a theatre company based on South Bank, and something had gone wrong. Their production of _Antony and Cleopatra_ had enjoyed a successful run, but during the final performance, Antony's sword had caused real damage to Proculeius, puncturing the skin and muscle of his leg and tearing a ligament. Antony had been played by Eric Gray. The actor playing Proculeius had been rushed to hospital - fortunately the damage, though serious, was not life-threatening, but everyone was shocked and uncomfortable. Such accidents weren't unheard of, but they were rare.

Marianne West, a seductive and tragic Cleopatra, insisted that Eric was beside himself with guilt and worry for his fellow actor. Apparently he had been suffering with terrible headaches all week, and had lost concentration at the vital moment.

The part about the headaches interested me. It was only a passing comment, but Marianne West obviously considered it worth saying. Some studies seem to suggest a connection between headaches and other problems - they can sometimes be a precursor to, or even a symptom of, mental illness. I wondered if he was prone to them, or if it had been an isolated event.

None of the staff had said anything about headaches, and my hopes rose. It could be a step towards trying to help him. If the headaches had stopped since his treatment, they might conceivably have something to do with the breakdown. Which in turn could tip the balance toward it _being_ a breakdown rather than chronic mental illness or psychopathy.

About a week after my initial connection with Eric, I asked Dr Brandt to stay outside again while I interviewed him. I expected some sort of demur or reiteration of his previous warning, but my colleague agreed with barely a twitch. I was pleased with his confidence in me. I am a doctor in my own right, but I'm still only in my early thirties, and being a youngish woman I'm used to older male doctors not always having the highest degree of faith in my abilities. Dr Brandt is a good man, if a little gruff.

All I had to do now was win the same confidence from Eric.

It was difficult. He didn't open up so quickly this time. About ten minutes passed before he even spoke. He remained distant through the whole interview, answering my various careful questions but not really ever connecting with me in the way that he had on my first solo visit. His eyes were shaded, and he spent an inordinate amount of time staring at his hands, folded on the table in front of him. After fifteen minutes, he moved them so that his elbows rested on the surface, and steepled his long, artistic fingers in front of his mouth. Eventually my attempts at gentle questioning seemed to irritate him. He laid his hands flat, palms-down, on the table, and said,

"Dr Kerr, I don't suffer from headaches. I have already said this - why are you still asking me?"

I explained that I wanted to be absolutely sure and get my facts straight. I thought I saw a sudden incisive gleam in his eyes, but he closed them just as I noticed it.

"I had headaches when I was a child, but there was a specific reason for that." A twist of pain wrought a tiny furrow above the bridge of his nose. He opened his eyes again - they were bright green today, and clear as winter. "Other than that, the only time I've had trouble with them was during that run of _Antony and Cleopatra_ that you seem to want to rake up."

I restrained myself from doing a dance of joy. At last he had said what I'd hoped he would say.

My satisfaction was shortlived. He shut down almost immediately after giving me the information I wanted. I think he has a problem with letting people know almost anything about himself. As an actor, he is used to hiding behind masks, literal and metaphorical, and so he doesn't really know how to handle reality, especially as it relates to himself. I wouldn't take this as a proof of mental illness. I believe it's a fairly common problem for actors. Occupational hazard, I imagine.

I kept visiting him, trying to get through his wall of ice. Sometimes he was almost friendly - witty, rather charming in an off-hand sort of way, ready to talk about the theatre and Shakespeare and Sheridan and music... in fact, about anything rather than his past or his emotions.

Other days he was quiet and contemplative, rather unnervingly reminiscent of a classical sculpture. He would not make eye contact, preferring to stare with a fixed intensity at the wall, the floor, the table; anything other than my face.

And then there were the days when he was at his worst - bitter and sarcastic, full of unpleasant irony and apparent disdain for everything. Those days were thankfully few, but when they did coincide with my visits I always left feeling bruised.

His was a deeply complex and troubled personality, that I knew. Beyond that lay only conjecture. Was he unstable? Almost certainly. But insane? I doubted it. We all have our moments of madness, but generally these are outweighed by our moments of lucidity. I could not yet determine whether his lucidity was enough to tip the balance toward sanity.

And then there was that day, about a month after my initial visit.

He looked exhausted. I had never seen him anything other than collected, poised, and cool as a Norwegian lake. Today there was a shadow over his face, and were it not impossible I would have said he'd been out on the town and was rather the worse for wear. He sat in his chair loosely, lounging, not from indolence but rather from what appeared to be a sheer lack of energy. The paradoxically cold intensity which characterized him was dim, dulled, and hidden under a layer of palpable weariness.

"What happened to you?"

I had learnt early on that it was better to be blunt than diplomatic with him. Maybe he preferred a more direct approach; maybe it simply surprised him more - either way, it was the only method of getting through to him that I had so far discovered.

His eyes flickered. "I didn't sleep well."

I waited. He was looking down at his hands, evidently not intending to elaborate.

"There are nights when I don't sleep well," I said, "but I don't usually come out of them looking like that. If I didn't know better I'd tell the staff to start hiding the Scotch."

His eyes burned up to mine, the energy suddenly returning. Apparently it was an eye-contact day. "But you do know better, so why say it? I have _never_ touched Scotch in my life, and I wouldn't begin now."

Clearly I had hit a nerve. "Sorry. I was trying to make a joke. Feeble, I know. But there's no need to bite my head off."

He grumbled his way into remorse. "Alright, I know you were just teasing, I'm sorry. My…" he swallowed. "My father was fond of Scotch. Actually he was addicted to it. Just the name brings back memories I'd rather not revisit."

I was startled but pleased, though I did my best not to show it. I hadn't expected him to let go so much information so quickly. Normally it took longer to draw him out in conversation. Maybe his rough night had lowered his defences. That being so, I'd have to be a bit more careful than usual - I didn't want to start a fight, and the more tired he was, the more lethal he was likely to be.

"Eric, do you want to talk about your bad night?"

" _You_ obviously want to talk about it," he said with a look that wasn't quite a glare.

"I mean, were you uncomfortable or did you just have trouble sleeping?"

A tiny smile twisted the corner of his mouth. "Oh no, I wasn't uncomfortable. Of course it's not a patch on the Savoy, but I really can't complain about the standard of customer service…"

There was certainly nothing wrong with his sense of humour.

"I have suffered with insomnia periodically since I was quite young," he continued, surprising me again.

"Do you know why?"

"I don't want to sleep," he said with flat candour. "Sleep interferes with my thought processes."

"I don't think it's just that, though, is it? You can't possibly need to think _all night_."

"Will you ever stop prying, you cursedly irritating woman?" he snapped back at me.

"No," I returned. "I'm here to pry. That's the entire point of my being here, so if you're not going to talk to me about anything I think perhaps I'd better leave."

For a second I thought I'd totally blown it. He looked ready to explode. And then, suddenly, he relaxed, rolling his eyes. "I suppose it isn't your fault you have an exasperating personality. I expect your parents are to blame. Please give them my congratulations - they created a monster. They must be very proud."

"They are," I said firmly, "but we aren't here to discuss them."

"I have bad dreams." The statement hung in the air between us. I couldn't believe he had just said it. He hates exposing vulnerabilities, and I had expected a long battle to try and get the truth out of him. He was running his hand through his hair now, tugging at the pitch-black strands as they curled slightly around his fingers. I think he had even shocked himself. He was no longer looking at me, and continued to stare into middle distance even through the ensuing question-and-answer session. Apparently eye contact was off the table again. I felt as if I was interviewing a celebrity. Which, I suppose, I _was_.

"Are they specific?"

"Painfully so."

"Are they… memories?"

"Mostly, yes."

"Your childhood? Your father?"

"Sometimes. Other times I dream about the things I've done. None of it makes for very pleasant repose."

"Do you mean you dream about the murder?" This could get very interesting indeed.

"Yes. The others vary, but that one is always the same. I see her face. I feel the madness run through my blood, I feel the desperation. My head aches, and she won't stop. And then she is quiet at last, and my hands are shaking and I feel free. I want to smile, to laugh, because she doesn't talk anymore, and I am safe. But then I know she is dead, and suddenly I don't feel safe anymore; I feel haunted... and then I wake up."

A shiver ran down my spine. "No wonder you don't want to sleep."

"Oh, that's hardly the worst one!" he said ruefully, and finally he looked at me. "You don't want to hear the worst ones." His eyes seemed to have widened to twice their usual size.

"I do - but only if you want to tell me. I don't want to go to places that will traumatize you. Not without warning, anyway."

"I have to live with the trauma nearly every night," he said simply. "I think I can cope."

There is no denying his peculiarities; there never has been. But sometimes he shows such depth and such emotion that I cannot reconcile what I know of him with the judgement so cavalierly passed on him by so many other people. I do not believe him to be a psychopath. Nobody who has seen him act and sing could believe it. He feels too much. His coldness is studied rather than integral.

"The ones about your childhood - can you tell me about those?"

He settled back in his chair, folding his hands across his stomach and resting his elbows on the arms of the chair. "Often I dream of my mother. She talks to me, but I can't make her hear me when I respond. It upsets her. She thinks I don't love her. And my father… beats her."

"Did he do that in real life?"

His eyes were now darkening. "Yes. Almost every day. And then he would start on me."

I felt a sharp twinge of compassion. Crazed murderer though he might appear to be, this man clearly had serious emotional problems due to a childhood dominated by a violent, drunken father.

"I loved my mother," he said, his voice cracking but hardened with something perilously close to defiance. I recognized that he was baring a part of himself to me that probably very few people had ever seen. He wasn't used to opening up - in his mind it no doubt equated with displaying weakness. At the very least it was a risk.

"I'm glad someone in her family did," I replied.

My response seemed to take him aback. "She… she was an amazing person. She believed in me, you know. She always said I could be something special."

"She was perceptive," I said.

He stared at me. "She was. But…"

"You are something special, Eric. I've seen some of your work. I went to see Les Miserables a few years ago when you were on… I've never forgotten it. You're an incredibly talented, dedicated artist. I've never seen Marius played with so much passion. And I love that musical, so trust me, I've seen a fair few. Normally my attention is almost solely taken up with Jean Valjean, but you completely stole that show."

"You remembered me from that, seven years ago?"

"I was young and impressionable," I smiled. "And you certainly made an impression!"

"Thank you." Something told me the gratitude didn't come easily to him. He looked wistful.

"You miss it."

And just like that, the freezer went back on. "Of course I miss it. It's my life. Ending up labelled a homicidal maniac and being left to rot in Broadmoor was never exactly on my bucket list."

There it was again - that impenetrable wall of sarcasm.

"You're not being left to rot, though, Eric. I'm trying to help you."

"Perhaps you should stop trying," he said darkly. "I expect I'm beyond redemption."

I shook my head. "You don't mean that. You're just afraid of what my help will mean for you. You don't want to open up to me. It scares you. I know you don't want to hear this but I'm telling you anyway, because you can't go through life refusing to hear the truth just because you don't like it."

He chuckled, a low, soft noise that shook his shoulders a little. "Why not? Truth is relative anyway. If you don't like it, you can create your own."

"And that's what you do, isn't it? Create your own truth."

The smile had disappeared - he raised an eyebrow. "Naturally. I'm an actor, it's what we do."

"Yes, but you do it outside of the theatre too. You've spent your life building your own world, and when things get difficult or unpleasant, you go into it and lock the door behind you."

He stood up, and began to pace up and down, bearing an unnerving resemblance to some caged beast. It was the most agitated I'd seen him so far. His arms swung at his sides, his fists clenched. He turned on his heel to shoot back his considered reply, voice hardened by the effort of the confidence he was trying to project. "I won't deny it. It's always seemed the best thing to do. We all have our worlds. Some of us escape into television or shopping, others into art and music and writing. We all do it, Dr Kerr."

"But not all of us over-identify with psychopathic fictional characters and have a mental breakdown."

He said nothing. I'm not sure I've ever heard such a loud silence. And then he whirled around and yanked the chair backward across the floor so its legs scraped and squealed against the hard floor. It sounded harsh, a knife-stab against the stark quiet. For a second I really thought he was going to pick the chair up and fling it against the wall, or possibly at me, but instead he simply wrapped his hands around the back of it, and I could see his knuckles were white. He was breathing hard and deep, and his eyes were now such a dark green that they were almost black. We stayed like that for what seemed like forever, staring into each other's faces. His eyes seared into mine as I gazed back at him with the sort of horrified fascination I would imagine is felt by a rabbit as it looks its last on the headlights of the car swooping toward it. And then, with jolting incongruity, he smiled.

"Oh... I scared you then, didn't I? I'm sorry. What did you think I was going to do?"

My eyes went to the chair. I couldn't quite trust myself to speak yet.

"Oh, the chair? Well, yes, I'll admit I did contemplate that for a moment, but you see I'm really not so crazy as you still seem to believe."

"You're not exactly trying to convince me," I said, surprised at how level my voice was.

He burst out in a laugh that ended as abruptly as it began. "You're infuriating. But I like you."

"Thank you. I think."

It was so strange. His sudden snap of angry intensity should have made me very nervous of him, but instead, once I had got over the initial unpleasant shock, I felt as though his outburst was the brief, electric thunderstorm that had cleared the air between us. He seemed to relax more, to open up, little by little, without me having to prise him open like an obstinate clam.

And yet, there were still bad days.

One of these came a few weeks after I had begun (no doubt prematurely) to congratulate myself on my measure of success with him so far.

Dr Brandt had suggested that I should go through a standard profiling questionnaire with Eric. I wasn't sure how well he would respond, but as I had, I felt, been making progress, I decided to give it a try.

He was in a peculiar mood anyway. I could tell from the minute I sat down opposite him that today wasn't going to be an easy one. He managed something like a thin smile, but his eyes were distant, and I knew he wasn't really with me. He was back in his head again. I sighed, and started the questionnaire.

He was stubborn. Every question was picked to tiny pieces, analysed with irritatingly minute attention to all the wrong details, and enough hairs were split to provide wigs for half the world's population of follically challenged men.

Finally, he snapped.

"Is there a point to all these irrelevancies, or do you just enjoy asking meaningless questions?" He had apparently reached a stage of boredom I hadn't previously witnessed. He lost anything that still remained of his lazy charm and became suddenly snappy, overflowing with sharp sarcasm, all complicated edges and barbed spines, like some bizarre prickly undersea creature.

"Of course there's a point," I explained, trying to stay patient without sounding patronizing; a surprisingly hard balance to maintain, especially when dealing with Eric. "I'm trying to ascertain whether you really have recovered from your mental break, or are just saying so. I have to control for variables like this."

His eyes were narrowed - today they were a particularly chilly shade of pale blue - and his lips were thinned, with a tiny lift at the corners that was not genuine amusement but rather an uncomfortably satisfied superiority. This was my least favourite of his various expressions. It made him look decidedly sinister. "I see. So if I answer these seemingly trivial questions correctly, I am sane - and if I don't, I'm not?"

"There are no right or wrong answers," I began, but he cut me off with a disdainful wave of his left hand.

"Oh please, spare me! We both know that's complete balderdash. If it were true, there would be no earthly point to you asking me any of these questions in the first place. I could have stayed in bed."

"I meant that you can't get a question _wrong_. They're all just a way for me to try to judge your mental state."

He shot me a look dripping with irony. "I suppose you've found that I really am a psychopath. Congratulations! By dint of careful, gentle interrogation, you've succeeded in discovering something that various people have been telling me for years."

"Do you know what I think?" I asked, refusing to be daunted.

He smirked, leaning back in his chair. He propped his right elbow on the arm of the chair and hid his mouth behind his fingers, stroking his top lip very gently in a gesture I had come to recognize as one of slight discomfort. "Probably. But of course you're going to tell me anyway."

"I think that all this flippant sarcasm is actually a defence mechanism you've set up. You discovered that if you could put people off with your nasty attitude and a good dose of snarky humour, they'd never get close enough to hurt you."

An expression flashed across his face, quicksilver, ephemeral, and unless I had been looking very closely, I would have missed it before he schooled his features back into their usual vaguely amused ennui. Fortunately, I was looking very closely. It was hard to say just what emotion it was that had vanished as quickly as it appeared, but if I was forced to put a name to it, I think I would call it fear.

"Am I right?"

He sneered, but it was a little less confident than usual. "Even if you were, I'd hardly gratify the psychoanalyst in you by admitting it."

"So I am right." I couldn't help just the tiniest flicker of satisfaction.

"I didn't say that."

"No. You _didn't say it_ very carefully."

His inky brows snapped together. "I begin to feel superfluous to requirements. You are obviously more than capable of conducting this session on your own, so I fail to see why I'm still here. I could be playing backgammon with Richard while you sit here and answer all your questions yourself. I'm sure backgammon would be more intellectually stimulating."

"Richard?" I inquired, choosing to cut through the wall of snark.

"An acquaintance," he said, offhandedly.

"Eric, this is very good. You've started making friends!"

He scowled. "I said _acquaintance_ , not friend. I don't make friends, at least not in the way that all you other people seem to."

"I understand," I said, with a not entirely feigned sympathy. He despises any kind of pity, so I hoped to get a reaction.

"Oh really? And what exactly do you understand?" He was very harsh today. I wondered if he'd been having nightmares again. He is always

much more caustic when he has been suffering with them.

"I understand that you don't want anyone to get close, so you pretend to yourself that nobody matters to you, that a friend is nothing more than an acquaintance, and that makes you feel safe, because while you keep them at arm's length, they can't wound you or let you down."

"People can only wound you if you let them," he shrugged, but it was too late - I'd already caught his expression, as fleeting as the last one, but just as strong. Hurt.

"So you believe it's your fault if people fail you?"

He said nothing.

"Eric, I've read your file. I know you lost your parents and got put into foster care when you were eleven. I know you were bounced from family to family... that must have been very hard for you. I think you were a quiet boy. Probably sensitive. Theatre and music are passions that run in the blood, so you were no doubt viewed as different, and no child enjoys that. And that's before we even get to the fact that you witnessed your father's suicide. I can only imagine what that did to you."

He wouldn't look at me. His hands were clenched together on the table, the veins in his wrists standing out like cords. I forced myself to stay calm even though I was beginning to feel afraid. I had to remind myself that even at his most violent so far, he hadn't actually hurt me.

"You have no idea," he whispered.

"That's why I want you to tell me," I countered, as gently as I could.

He looked up then, his facade back up with that irrepressible, aggravating smirk. "So you can slip me into a nice convenient pigeonhole of analytical pity? Forgive me if I don't take you up on that."

"No, Eric. I'm trying to help you, remember? I don't believe you're insane. I think you had a breakdown, and although you're still damaged, you're not crazy. You're bitter, and broken, and you seem to enjoy being difficult, but you're no less sane for that. I want to help you. But I can't if you refuse to give me anything to work with."

He sighed, and opened out his hands in an expansive gesture. "Alright then. Tell me what you want from me."

"I need you to give a little. Tell me how you feel instead of leaving me to work it out. Talk to me. If you can, I'd like you to tell me about yourself and your past. I know it won't be easy but we can take it as slowly as you need. It's one thing reading your file - it's something completely different to hear you tell me yourself. I need your perspective on things. I need you to trust me."

His eyebrow shot up. "We might have trouble with the last part of that. I don't trust anyone."

"I know. But you spoke to me when I came alone that first time, and that has to stand for something. Maybe you don't realize it but I think you may trust me a tiny bit already, or you'd just have carried on being an elective mute."

He smiled. It was a tiny thing, barely a twitch of his mouth, but it was there, and it was for once genuine.

"Damn you," he murmured, but without heat. "Why are you always right?"

He didn't talk any more that day, and I decided not to push my luck. With someone like him, it would be only too easy for me to undo all my hard work purely by pushing too hard. My nightmare was that he would shut down again and refuse to interact with me at all.

But over the next few days, he started to open up again. Being Eric, of course, he was never going to lay his cards on the table in a grand gesture of trust. He tested me, prodding me to see exactly how far he could trust me, where my boundaries lay, and how far he could go before I confirmed his constant underlying fear. Sensing this, I tried to open myself up in turn, attempting to show him that there were in fact no boundaries. It was a long, tricky process. On the one hand, I didn't want to do or say anything that might cause him to withdraw; on the other hand, the idea of letting him in so completely was a little unnerving. After all, as far as everyone else was concerned, he was a psychopath, or at the very least a sociopath with violent tendencies. I knew him as something a little less terrifying than that, but even so, there could be no denying that he was decidedly odd at times. And when he was in one of his intense, burning moods, he could be really quite frightening. Could I truly let him in without getting hurt? The problem was that I couldn't see any other way of achieving the desired result. If I wanted to help him, he had to open up to me, and in order for that to happen, he had to learn to trust me implicitly. Even now I wasn't sure if it would ever happen, but it had to be worth a try.


End file.
